Arbeitswelten der Digitalisierung

Zu den Potentialen prozessorientierter Ethnografie an einem Beispiel zur user*innen participation

Abstract

Current dynamics of knowledge, stemming from the fact that companies align themselves towards digitalization, give rise to a certain set of known methodological challenges. This is significant not only in relation to the access of closed fields, but also especially concerns questions of how the reversibility of goals, decisions and digital material can be adequately taken into account ethnographically. Through insights from an organizational ethnography into the digitalization strategy of a company in the fitness sector (especially the aspect of user participation), this article describes the core tenets of a process-oriented ethnography of digitalizing social worlds of work, which allows for clear differentiation between routines and events of digitalization. Consequently, such an approach makes it possible to visualize, systematize, and thus compare the complex interplay of order-reproducing, order-breaking and order-creating processes in the context of their cultural anchoring.